Although computers have become more plentiful in recent years, shared computer use remains common in many settings. For example, in U.S. public schools, the ratio of students to computers is nearly four to one, and the number of Internet-enabled computers available in U.S. public libraries is approximately three for every five thousand people. In developing countries, these ratios can be even more skewed. For example in rural schools in developing countries the student-to-computer ratio can be as high as ten to one. Even when resource constraints are not a factor, the social and pedagogical benefits of face-to-face collaborations and shared viewing of information can be a compelling reason for collaborators to share a single computer.
Web search is an increasingly common online activity, and is often undertaken in shared-computer settings. For example, students often work together to complete homework assignments, friends seek information about entertainment opportunities, family members jointly plan vacation travel, and colleagues jointly conduct research for their projects. However, sharing computers for a joint Web search can be frustrating and inefficient when, for instance, individual collaborators disagree on search queries to issue, Web pages to view, and Web page content to explore.
Commercial search engines and Web browsers focus on single-user scenarios. However, collaboration is an important aspect of the information retrieval behaviors of users in domains such as schools, libraries, and offices. For example, research on the collaborative information retrieval activities of library users at a university has identified several common types of collaborative search practices, including “joint search”, in which a group of people gathers around a single computer.
Current practices include proposed systems for remote collaboration on Web tasks, such as browsing and searching. Other currently deployed practices include, co-located collaborative search of databases through visualization of a user's search process that can be shared with others, co-located search of digital photo collections by groups seated around an interactive tabletop display, and a systems that automatically divides a single Web page into multiple components distributed among participating handheld devices of co-located collaborators for group browsing in a mobile setting. Additionally, current practices further include, the generation of personalized views of Web pages for multiple co-located users based on the currently available devices (e.g., laptops, PDAs, etc.), and enabling multiple PDAs to control a Web browser on a shared display. However, current practices do not contemplate a collaborative Web search session in a co-located setting when several people are gathered around a single computer performing search operations using various input modalities to input search queries/commands and to navigate through content results.
From the foregoing it is appreciated that there exists a need for systems and methods to ameliorate the shortcomings of existing practices.